I can see why some would really love this book. It’s well written in terms of the prose and it is one of those books that has Things to Say. I could not love it, though. This is a post-apocalyptic story that spends the majority of its time looking back to its characters’ lives and the world as it was pre-apocalypse. Or, in other words, to society as it is today. It is a book about Now, set in a future world and society that should be infinitely more interesting.

Worse, it failed to engage my emotions in any of the gazillion characters introduced. They went places, and did things, and felt feelings, and I didn’t care about any of them.

And worst of all, this was an unsatisfyingly implausible post-apocalyptic world. The few explanations of how it works just seem implausible. Over 300 people gathered to create a new society in an airport. How did they sustain themselves after all the airport snacks and restaurants ran out of food? They hunted for apparently plentiful deer in a nearby forest. With an NSA handgun and apparently giant stockpile of bullets. After that? Who knows. The story is more interested in how they created a school to teach their children, not about life skills needed to survive in a post-apocalyptic world, but about how you used to be able to push a button and talk to someone on the other side of the world, or about how you could fly in planes. Characters spend all their time talking about the lost internet and all the information lost to them with it. Hello, people, have you heard of books? They apparently only read gossip magazines. And so on.

Audiobook, via Audible. Excellent performance by Kirsten Potter. I read this for the 2018 Halloween Bingo square Doomsday: anything related to the end of the world, doomsday cults, or a post-apocalypse world.